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Quotes

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

—John Maynard Keynes, 1917

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

—Vegetius, c. 385

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865